It is unfortunate for the compulsive reader that he must encounter the world outside books. But this world appears to him somehow less real. It is as if a TV programme – an endless soap opera – were perpetually interrupting his meals, or his sleep. He is like Descartes, who was confident that the paper in his hand or the heat of the fireplace were real, but not as real as his thoughts, which were more real!

Of course, Descartes was a compulsive reader – he must have been, argues Bertrand Russell, or else he could not have done as much as he had. (Descartes claimed to have read only a few books.) It is surely not beyond a man who can join the army to escape from his friends in order to meditate to consider his thoughts to be more solid than a sword. In Holland, he moved house seventeen times to be free of their unenlightening company. Of course, Descartes is an extreme case: the compulsive reader does not regard his thoughts as having greater thinginess (I avoid the word being) than things. But I illustrate the psychosis of the latter with the aid of the hallucinations of the former.

The most powerful adversary of our hero (who can say he is unheroic?) is money. In disparagement of this doctrine, it will be claimed that money is a universal adversary – except to those who possess bundles of it. Furthermore, money is the enemy of the poor, not the compulsive reader. In our country, at any rate, he must be a man of sufficient means to be able to acquire, though perhaps not retain, that magnificent obsession. Ergo, the compulsive reader is not deserving of sympathy.

This argument is fundamentally unsound. That money is the enemy of the poor is an axiom; that it is the enemy of the compulsive reader is a theorem. And there are other axioms on which a theorem can rest. One such axiom is a kindred of the money-is-the-enemy-of-the-poor axiom. It is that poverty is of two kinds, one material, another spiritual. And money is no less inimical to the latter deprivation than to the former.

Therefore, unless the compulsive reader is a man of means, he must necessarily be getting and spending. I use the word ‘necessarily’ advisedly. Karl Marx is the knowledge-pursuing hobo par excellence. Yet even Marx had to write for a capitalist newspaper to earn a measly shilling. And he was fortunate to have the resources of the British Museum at his fingertips; fortunate it was for him that his adoptive country compensated his poverty with its opulence. The Poverty of Nations extends as much to the goods of the mind as to goods.

To return to our argument. The compulsive reader must then be necessarily getting and spending. But his dilemma and tragedy is that he refuses to give his soul away, and confer on the world a sordid boon. Now, how to square the circle? For the price of that recent book by J.M. Roberts is $30! It must be earned; meanwhile, his body – whose existence he cannot deny like Descartes – must be fed, clothed and cared for, lest it keep the mind from its natural delicacies. There’s no escaping the fact: he must work.

And that’s not the end of the matter. There are the friends and relatives he must keep at bay. If he lives in Bangladesh, one of the sure benefits he will derive from his continued residence in this resourceless land is that all of his friends and the bulk of his relatives will have discontinued theirs. They have long since decamped, emigrated, and the compulsive reader grows grateful for the lack of patriotism of his compatriots. At least, he doesn’t have to join the army!

But there will always be a few obstinate souls, moved (the word is inappropriate) not by patriotism nor by the financial prospects of the nation, but by a kind of infuriating inertia (I gave warning that the word was inappropriate!) that compels them to linger like ghosts over a grave, wailing and weakening the concentration of the compulsive reader. They will visit him at odd hours; he is immersed in the agonies of the First Intermediate Period and is about to turn the page to see how anarchy in ancient Egypt came to an end – when the bell rings!

But our reader is not without inner fortitude and resource. He is unruffled by the presence of his guest; indeed, he welcomes him into the drawing room. Then, over warm cups of tea, he teases information out of this walking newspaper; yes, our reader has learned the trick of turning people into books. He may not have learnt how anarchy in Ancient Egypt terminated, but, in less than an hour, he is fully apprised as to the progress of anarchy in his own land.

For it is a narrow wisdom that focuses only on Ancient Egypt and neglects the motherland. And since the motherland is more inscrutable than Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the compulsive reader is immersed only in the written word, he must turn to subtler archaeology to unearth the latest in politics, economics and public administration. In short, he must turn to gossip.

Gossip as a form of scholarship has been – to state the obvious – vastly underrated. Between the event and the printed word lies the Reuters-like gossip. And the compulsive reader would be woefully underinformed if he contented himself with newspapers.

"Do you know what happened yesterday?"

"Yes, I read that ----- ."

"Rubbish! Do you want to know what really happened?"

And, of course, you do.